Acquisitions

IntervalZero Acquires Ardence Embedded Software Business From Citrix Systems

July 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IntervalZero, a new embedded software company led by a group of senior Ardence executives, today announced that it has acquired Ardence’s Embedded software business from Citrix.

The company, which is based in Waltham, MA, is headed by CEO Jeffrey D. Hibbard, an Ardence/Citrix executive with more than 20 years of software engineering, sales, marketing and management experience.

IntervalZero officially completed the acquisition on July 15 and will continue to market and sell the Embedded products under their existing names – RTX, ETS and Select. IntervalZero said worldwide Embedded Distribution/Reseller channels and Embedded Partner affiliations – notably the Partner relationships with Microsoft and Intel – remain in place.

Citrix, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, acquired Ardence’s Enterprise and Embedded software businesses in January 2007. Although Citrix determined that the Ardence Embedded products were not a good fit for its Enterprise product portfolio, Citrix made an equity investment in IntervalZero.

“We believe there are significant opportunities in Embedded technology, but it is not a core business for Citrix. To continue to grow and succeed, the Embedded business needed both the focus and the investment that Jeff and the IntervalZero team are fully committed to delivering. Their approach to the market and their business model are sound, which is why we have maintained a stake in the IntervalZero,” said Lou Shipley, VP and General Manager of Citrix’s Xen Products Group.

Breaking: Veeam Software Acquires nworks

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, known for virtualization management tools and its FastSCP file management freeware for VMware environments, has acquired nworks, a maker of “enterprise management connectors” that link VMware virtual infrastructure tools and enterprise systems management tools from Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

“Our customers have been asking to manage their physical and virtual infrastructures through a single console, and many of them have significant investments in HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager,” says Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO (also see our video interview with him at the latest VMworld Europe).

Veeam’s new lineup of product offerings will include backup, reporting and monitoring tools as well as Veeam Configurator, which manages VMware configurations from a Windows interface; nworks Smart Plug-In for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager, which incorporates VMware management into HP OpenView; and nworks Management Pack for VMware for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, which incorporates VMware management into Microsoft SCOM.

INX Buys VMware Virtualization Consulting Organization AccessFlow

June 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

INX yesterday announced that it has acquired the operations of AccessFlow, a consulting organization focused on delivering VMware-based virtualization solutions.

AccessFlow is an award winning VMware Premier & Gold Certified VAC Partner and is one of the first VMware partners experienced in VMware’s new Site Recovery Manager product, expected to be available later this year. The company currently has 30 employees of which 17 are solutions engineers.

The acquisition closed on June 6, 2008, and was structured as a purchase of the ongoing operations of AccessFlow by INX. INX expects the transaction to be accretive to per-share earnings for the 12-month period following the transaction.

Breaking: VMware To Acquire B-hive Networks

May 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced (PDF) it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel.

With this acquisition, VMware intends to leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines – on both servers and desktops.

In addition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel.
The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.

“As customers increasingly standardize on the VMware platform to run their business-critical applications, it is critical for virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure the performance of applications from an end-user’s perspective,” said Stephen Herrod, Ph.D., chief technology officer, VMware. “B-hive’s agentless, virtual appliance-based approach goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to proactively manage application performance to specified levels. These capabilities, combined with VMware’s proven virtualization platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives. For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application. In conjunction with VMware’s automated IT service delivery and business continuity capabilities, B-Hive’s service level management capabilities further deliver on the vision of an automated, always-on, virtual datacenter.”

Founded in 2005, B-hive has a solution that gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. According to the press release, the B-hive solution is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines.

Its flagship product, B-hive Conductor, monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, but can also proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots. B-hive Conductor is agent-less, packaged as a virtual appliance and provides open, standards-based interfaces.

[Source: Globes]

Cisco And EMC To Merge?

May 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters 5 Comments

We love rumors. This time, it’s not about EMC selling off its majority stake in VMware to say, Intel. President and chief editor of TMC, Rich Tehrani, is throwing another sweet-sounding one into the air: an upcoming merger between Cisco and EMC.

“If you are Cisco, it makes sense to pick up EMC now because the stock is down a bit and moreover Cisco would be able to immediately expand its product line beyond networking, telepresence and networking.

Overnight, Cisco could become a leader in storage and a very strong security player.

Remember that Cisco was an early VMware investor and they likely want to expand their ownership of the company.

Remember also that Cisco is doing some amazing things with virtualization in their routers and owning a premiere name in the virtualization space can only help their core offerings.”

What do you think? Any possibility this particular rumor might come through? Or total BS?

Let us know in comments!

IBM Snaps Up Storage Provider Diligent Technologies

April 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

IBM today announced it has acquired Diligent Technologies, a privately held storage “de-duplication” technology company headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts with research and development located in Tel Aviv, Israel. Diligent’s technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms were not disclosed, but The Register picked up rumors the deal was in the $200 million price range.

Diligent develops in-line data de-duplication software that is integrated with server and storage infrastructures to help organizations significantly reduce the amount and cost of physical storage required in data centers. From the press release:

Data de-duplication is an emerging technology that organizations are investing in today and Diligent’s innovative technology provides a single solution to support data protection, archive and data-retention applications – all while maintaining the integrity of the data.

The Diligent acquisition will be an important part of IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth. The new model is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

The acquisition of Diligent maps to the overall IBM enterprise strategy of developing more efficient, cost effective data centers and will further extend IBM’s storage portfolio.Combined with IBM, Diligent’s data de-duplication technology and solutions will:

address the unique data de-duplication requirements of enterprise clients for maximum in-line performance, scalability and data integrity;
complement clients’ installed backup/recovery applications (e.g. Tivoli Storage Manager and others);
reduce the amount of time required to backup and recover information;
enable the economical electronic transmission of back-up and archive data from primary to remote disaster recovery sites;
reduce the amount of physical storage required to help reduce costs and energy consumption

“Diligent’s data de-duplication software is a critical technology that will be integrated into the IBM Storage portfolio to further extend our information infrastructure strategy, allowing our clients to eliminate redundant data and streamline the infrastructure required to support their business – which can result in dramatic improvements in data center efficiency,” said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM System Storage. “Diligent’s industry-proven data de-duplication offerings are exceptionally suited for mid-range and enterprise clients, uniquely combining in-line performance, scalability and data integrity and extends IBM’s strong portfolio of strategic offerings that will help our clients reduce infrastructure costs, improve energy efficiency in the data center, and enable them to fully utilize their information on demand.”

Diligent will become part of the IBM System Storage brand of offerings.

Earlier this month, IBM announced its intent to acquire FilesX, a provider of continuous data protection software for mission-critical applications and remote offices.

Diligent, which has secured close to $47 million in funding, previously served as EMC’s Israel research and development lab before being spun-out from the storage firm in 2002.